speaks of Smith of Asia--"always inculcated at the Union----By the way,
you do not know, I suppose, anything of the life at Oxford?" "No," I
said, anxious to propitiate, "but I remember some boys once who seduced
an ekka and a pony into a Major's tent at a camp of exercise, laced
up the door, and let the Major fight it out with the horse." I told
that little incident in my best style, and was three parts through it
before I discovered that he was looking pained and shocked.
"That--ah--was not the side of Oxford that I had in mind when I was
saying that Haward of Exeter----" And he explained all about Mr.
Haward, who appeared to be a young gentleman, rising twenty-three,
of wonderful mental attainments, and as pernicious a prig as I ever
dreamed about. Mr. Haward had schemes for the better management of
creation; my friend told me them all--social, political and economical.
Then, just as I was feeling faint and very much in need of a drink,
he launched without warning upon the boundless seas of literature.
He wished to know whether I had read the works of Messrs. Guy de
Maupassant, Paul Bourget and Pierre Loti. This in the tone of a teacher
of Euclid. I replied that all my French was confined to the Vie
Parisienne and translations of Zola's novels with illustrations. Here
we parted. London is very large, and I do not think we shall meet any
more.
I thanked our Mutual Friend for his kindness, and asked for another
young man to play with. This gentleman was even younger than the
last, but quite as cocksure. He told me in the course of half a
cigar that only men of mediocre calibre went into the army, which
was a brutalising profession; that he suffered from nerves, and "an
uncontrollable desire to walk up and down the room and sob" (that was
too many cigarettes), and that he had never set foot out of England,
but knew all about the world from his own theories. Thought Dickens
coarse; Scott jingling and meretricious; and had not by any chance read
the novels of Messrs. Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget and Pierre Loti.
Him I left quickly, but sorry that he could not do a six weeks'
training with a Middlesex militia regiment, where he would really get
something to sob for. The novel business interested me. I perceived
that it was a fashion, like his tie and his collars, and I wanted
to work it to the fountain-head. To this end I procured the whole
Shibboleth from Guy de Maupassant even unto Pierre Loti by way of
Bourget. Unwholesome was a mild term for these interesting books, which
the young men assured me that they read for style. When a fat Major
makes that remark in an Indian Club, everybody hoots and laughs. But
you must not laugh overseas, especially at young gentlemen who have
been to Oxford and listened to Mr. Haward of Exeter.
Then I was introduced to another young man who said he belonged to
a movement called Toynbee Hall, where, I gathered, young gentlemen
took an indecent interest in the affairs of another caste, whom, with
rare tact, they called "the poor," and told them generally how to
order their lives. Such was the manner and general aggressiveness of
this third young gentleman, that if he had told me that coats were
generally worn and good for the protection of the body, I should have
paraded Bond Street in my shirt. What the poor thought of him I could
not tell, but there is no room for it in this letter. He said that
there was going to be an upheaval of the classes--the English are
very funny about their castes. They don't know how to handle them
one little bit, and never allow them to draw water or build huts in
peace--and the entire social fabric was about to be remodelled on
his recommendations, and the world would be generally altered past
recognition. No, he had never seen anything of the world, but close
acquaintance with authorities had enabled him to form dispassionate
judgments on the subjects, and had I, by any chance, read the novels of
Guy de Maupassant, Pierre Loti and Paul Bourget?
It was a mean thing to do, but I couldn't help it. I had read 'em. I
put him on, so to speak, far back in Paul Bourget, who is a genial sort
of writer. I pinned him to one book. He could not escape from Paul
Bourget. He was fed with it till he confessed--and he had been quite
ready to point out its beauties--that we could not take much interest
in the theories put forward in that particular book. Then I said: "Get
a dictionary and read him," which severed our budding friendship.
Thereafter I sought our Mutual Friend and walked up and down his room
sobbing, or words to that effect. "Good gracious!" said my friend. "Is
that what's troubling you? Now, I hold the ravaging rights over half
a dozen fields and a bit of a wood. You can pot rabbits there in the
evenings sometimes, and anyway you get exercise. Come along."
So I went. I have not yet killed anything, but it seems wasteful to
drive good powder and shot after poor little bunnies when there are so
many other things in the world that would be better for an ounce and
a half of number five at sixty yards--not enough to disable, but just
sufficient to sting, and be pricked out with a penknife.
I should like to wield that penknife.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 26: "Turnovers," No. IX.]
MY GREAT AND ONLY[27]
Whether Macdougal or Macdoodle be his name, the principle remains the
same, as Mrs. Nickleby said. The gentleman appeared to hold authority
in London, and by virtue of his position preached or ordained that
music-halls were vulgar, if not improper. Subsequently, I gathered
that the gentleman was inciting his associates to shut up certain
music-halls on the ground of the vulgarity aforesaid, and I saw with
my own eyes that unhappy little managers were putting notices into the
corners of their programmes begging the audience to report each and
every impropriety. That was pitiful, but it excited my interest.
Now, to the upright and impartial mind--which is mine--all the
diversions of Heathendom--which is the British--are of equal
ethnological value. And it is true that some human beings can be
more vulgar in the act of discussing etchings, editions of luxury,
or their own emotions, than other human beings employed in swearing
at each other across the street. Therefore, following a chain of
thought which does not matter, I visited very many theatres whose
licenses had never been interfered with. There I discovered men and
women who lived and moved and behaved according to rules which in no
sort regulate human life, by tradition dead and done with, and after
the customs of the more immoral ancients and Barnum. At one place the
lodging-house servant was an angel, and her mother a Madonna; at a
second they sounded the loud timbrel o'er a whirl of bloody axes, mobs,
and brown-paper castles, and said it was not a pantomime, but Art;
at a third everybody grew fabulously rich and fabulously poor every
twenty minutes, which was confusing; at a fourth they discussed the
Nudities and Lewdities in false-palate voices supposed to belong to
the aristocracy and that tasted copper in the mouth; at a fifth they
merely climbed up walls and threw furniture at each other, which is
notoriously the custom of spinsters and small parsons. Next morning the
papers would write about the progress of the modern drama (that was the
silver paper pantomime), and "graphic presentment of the realities of
our highly complex civilisation." That was the angel housemaid. By the
way, when an Englishman has been doing anything more than unusually
Pagan, he generally consoles himself with "over-civilisation." It's the
"martyr-to-nerves-dear" note in his equipment.
I went to the music-halls--the less frequented ones--and they were
almost as dull as the plays, but they introduced me to several
elementary truths. Ladies and gentlemen in eccentric, but not
altogether unsightly, costumes told me (a) that if I got drunk I should
have a head next morning, and perhaps be fined by the magistrate; (b)
that if I flirted promiscuously I should probably get into trouble;
(c) that I had better tell my wife everything and be good to her, or
she would be sure to find out for herself and be very bad to me; (d)
that I should never lend money; or (e) fight with a stranger whose form
I did not know. My friends (if I may be permitted to so call them)
illustrated these facts with personal reminiscences and drove them home
with kicks and prancings. At intervals circular ladies in pale pink and
white would low to their audience to the effect that there was nothing
half so sweet in life as "Love's Young Dream," and the billycock hats
would look at the four-and-elevenpenny bonnets, and they saw that it
was good and clasped hands on the strength of it. Then other ladies
with shorter skirts would explain that when their husbands
"Stagger home tight about two,
An' can't light the candle,
We taik the broom 'andle
An' show 'em what women can do."
Naturally, the billycocks, seeing what might befall, thought things
over again, and you heard the bonnets murmuring softly under the clink
of the lager-glasses: "Not _me_, Bill. Not _me_!" Now these things are
basic and basaltic truths. Anybody can understand them. They are as old
as Time. Perhaps the expression was occasionally what might be called
coarse, but beer is beer, and best in a pewter, though you can, if you
please, drink it from Venetian glass and call it something else. The
halls give wisdom and not too lively entertainment for sixpence--ticket
good for four pen'orth of refreshments, chiefly inky porter--and the
people who listen are respectable folk living under very grey skies who
derive all the light side of their life, the food for their imagination
and the crystallised expression of their views on Fate and Nemesis,
from the affable ladies and gentlemen singers. They require a few
green and gold maidens in short skirts to kick before them. Herein
they are no better and no worse than folk who require fifty girls very
much undressed, and a setting of music, or pictures that won't let
themselves be seen on account of their age and varnish, or statues and
coins. All animals like salt, but some prefer rock-salt, red or black
in lumps. But this is a digression.
Out of my many visits to the hall--I chose one hall, you understand,
and frequented it till I could tell the mood it was in before I had
passed the ticket-poll--was born the Great Idea. I served it as a slave
for seven days. Thought was not sufficient; experience was necessary.
I patrolled Westminster, Blackfriars, Lambeth, the Old Kent Road, and
many, many more miles of pitiless pavement to make sure of my subject.
At even I drank my lager among the billycocks, and lost my heart to
a bonnet. Goethe and Shakespeare were my precedents. I sympathised
with them acutely, but I got my Message. A chance-caught refrain of a
song which I understand is protected--to its maker I convey my most
grateful acknowledgments--gave me what I sought. The rest was made up
of four elementary truths, some humour, and, though I say it who should
leave it to the press, pathos deep and genuine. I spent a penny on a
paper which introduced me to a Great and Only who "wanted new songs."
The people desired them really. He was their ambassador, and taught
me a great deal about the property-right in songs, concluding with
a practical illustration, for he said my verses were just the thing
and annexed them. It was long before he could hit on the step-dance
which exactly elucidated the spirit of the text, and longer before he
could jingle a pair of huge brass spurs as a dancing-girl jingles her
anklets. That was my notion, and a good one.
The Great and Only possessed a voice like a bull, and nightly roared
to the people at the heels of one who was winning triple encores
with a priceless ballad beginning deep down in the bass: "We was
shopmates--boozin' shopmates." I feared that song as Rachel feared
Ristori. A greater than I had written it. It was a grim tragedy,
lighted with lucid humour, wedded to music that maddened. But my "Great
and Only" had faith in me, and I--I clung to the Great Heart of the
People--my people--four hundred "when it's all full, sir." I had not
studied them for nothing. I must reserve the description of my triumph
for another "Turnover."
There was no portent in the sky on the night of my triumph. A
barrowful of onions, indeed, upset itself at the door, but that was
a coincidence. The hall was crammed with billycocks waiting for "We
was shopmates." The great heart beat healthily. I went to my beer the
equal of Shakespeare and Molière at the wings in a first night. What
would my public say? Could anything live after the abandon of "We
was shopmates"? What if the redcoats did not muster in their usual
strength. O my friends, never in your songs and dramas forget the
redcoat. He has sympathy and enormous boots.
I believed in the redcoat; in the great heart of the people: above all
in myself. The conductor, who advertised that he "doctored bad songs,"
had devised a pleasant little lilting air for my needs, but it struck
me as weak and thin after the thunderous surge of the "Shopmates."
I glanced at the gallery--the redcoats were there. The fiddle-bows
creaked, and, with a jingle of brazen spurs, a forage-cap over his
left eye, my Great and Only began to "chuck it off his chest." Thus:
"At the back o' the Knightsbridge Barricks,
When the fog was a-gatherin' dim,
The Lifeguard talked to the Undercook,
An' the girl she talked to 'im."
"_Twiddle-iddle-iddle-lum-tum-tum!_" said the violins.
"_Ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-ting-ling!_" said the spurs of the Great
and Only, and through the roar in my ears I fancied I could catch a
responsive hoof-beat in the gallery. The next four lines held the
house to attention. Then came the chorus and the borrowed refrain.
It took--it went home with a crisp click. My Great and Only saw his
chance. Superbly waving his hand to embrace the whole audience, he
invited them to join him in:
"You may make a mistake when you're mashing a tart,
But you'll learn to be wise when you're older,
And don't try for things that are out of your reach,
And that's what the girl told the soldier, soldier, soldier,
And that's what the girl told the soldier."
I thought the gallery would never let go of the long-drawn howl on
"soldier." They clung to it as ringers to the kicking bell-rope. Then
I envied no one--not even Shakespeare. I had my house hooked--gaffed
under the gills, netted, speared, shot behind the shoulder--anything
you please. That was pure joy! With each verse the chorus grew louder,
and when my Great and Only had bellowed his way to the fall of the
Lifeguard and the happy lot of the Undercook, the gallery rocked again,
the reserved stalls shouted, and the pewters twinkled like the legs
of the demented ballet-girls. The conductor waved the now frenzied
orchestra to softer Lydian strains. My Great and Only warbled piano:
"At the back o' Knightsbridge Barricks,
When the fog's a-gatherin' dim,
The Lifeguard waits for the Undercook,
But she won't wait for 'im."
"_Ta-ra-rara-rara-ra-ra-rah!_" rang a horn clear and fresh as a
sword-cut. 'Twas the apotheosis of virtue.
"She's married a man in the poultry line
That lives at 'Ighgate 'Ill,
An' the Lifeguard walks with the 'ousemaid now,
An' (_awful pause_) she can't foot the bill!"
Who shall tell the springs that move masses? I had builded better
than I knew. Followed yells, shrieks and wildest applause. Then, as a
wave gathers to the curl-over, singer and sung to fill their chests
and heave the chorus through the quivering roof--alto, horns, basses
drowned, and lost in the flood--to the beach-like boom of beating feet:
"Oh, think o' my song when you're gowin' it strong
An' your boots is too little to 'old yer;
An' don't try for things that is out of your reach,
An' that's what the girl told the soldier, soldier, so-holdier!"
Ow! Hi! Yi! Wha-hup! Phew! Whew! Pwhit! Bang! Wang! Crr-rash! There was
ample time for variations as the horns uplifted themselves and ere the
held voices came down in the foam of sound--
"_That's what the girl told the soldier._"
Providence has sent me several joys, and I have helped myself to
others, but that night, as I looked across the sea of tossing
billycocks and rocking bonnets, my work, as I heard them give tongue,
not once, but four times--their eyes sparkling, their mouths twisted
with the taste of pleasure--I felt that I had secured Perfect Felicity.
I am become greater than Shakespeare. I may even write plays for
the Lyceum, but I never can recapture that first fine rapture that
followed the Upheaval of the Anglo-Saxon four hundred of him and her.
They do not call for authors on these occasions, but I desired no need
of public recognition. I was placidly happy. The chorus bubbled up
again and again throughout the evening, and a redcoat in the gallery
insisted on singing solos about "a swine in the poultry line," whereas
I had written "man," and the pewters began to fly, and afterwards the
long streets were vocal with various versions of what the girl had
really told the soldier, and I went to bed murmuring: "I have found my
destiny."
But it needs a more mighty intellect to write the Songs of the People.
Some day a man will rise up from Bermondsey, Battersea or Bow, and he
will be coarse, but clearsighted, hard but infinitely and tenderly
humorous, speaking the people's tongue, steeped in their lives and
telling them in swinging, urging, dinging verse what it is that their
inarticulate lips would express. He will make them songs. Such songs!
And all the little poets who pretend to sing to the people will scuttle
away like rabbits, for the girl (which, as you have seen, of course,
is wisdom) will tell that soldier (which is Hercules bowed under his
labours) all that she knows of Life and Death and Love.
And the same, they say, is a Vulgarity!
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 27: "Turnovers," No. IX.]
"THE BETRAYAL OF CONFIDENCES"[28]
That was its real name, and its nature was like unto it; but what else
could I do? You must judge for me.
They brought a card--the housemaid with the fan-teeth held it gingerly
between black finger and blacker thumb--and it carried the name Mr.
R.H. Hoffer in old Gothic letters. A hasty rush through the file of
bills showed me that I owed nothing to any Mr. Hoffer, and assuming my
sweetest smile, I bade Fan of the Teeth show him up. Enter stumblingly
an entirely canary-coloured young person about twenty years of age,
with a suspicious bulge in the bosom of his coat. He had grown no hair
on his face; his eyes were of a delicate water-green, and his hat
was a brown billycock, which he fingered nervously. As the room was
blue with tobacco-smoke (and Latakia at that) he coughed even more
nervously, and began seeking for me. I hid behind the writing-table and
took notes. What I most noted was the bulge in his bosom. When a man
begins to bulge as to that portion of his anatomy, hit him in the eye,
for reasons which will be apparent later on.
He saw me and advanced timidly. I invited him seductively to the only
other chair, and "What's the trouble?" said I.
"I wanted to see you," said he.
"I am me," said I.
"I--I--I thought you would be quite otherwise," said he.
"I am, on the contrary, completely this way," said I. "Sit still, take
your time and tell me all about it."
He wriggled tremulously for three minutes, and coughed again. I
surveyed him, and waited developments. The bulge under the bosom
crackled. Then I frowned. At the end of three minutes he began.
"I wanted to see what you were like," said he.
I inclined my head stiffly, as though all London habitually climbed the
storeys on the same errand and rather wearied me.
Then he delivered himself of a speech which he had evidently got by
heart. He flushed painfully in the delivery.
"I am flattered," I said at the conclusion. "It's beastly gratifying.
What do you want?"
"Advice, if you will be so good," said the young man.
"Then you had better go somewhere else," said I.
The young man turned pink. "But I thought, after I had read your
works--all your works, on my word--I had hoped that you would
understand me, and I really have come for advice." The bulge crackled
more ominously than ever.
"I understand perfectly," said I. "You are oppressed with vague and
nameless longings, are you not?"
"I am, terribly," said he.
"You do not wish to be as other men are? You desire to emerge from the
common herd, to make your mark, and so forth?"
"Yes," said he in an awestricken whisper. "That is my desire."
"Also," said I, "you love, excessively, in several places at once
cooks, housemaids, governesses, schoolgirls, and the aunts of other
people."
"But one only," said he, and the pink deepened to beetroot.
"Consequently," said I, "you have written much--you have written
verses."
"It was to teach me to write prose, only to teach me to write prose,"
he murmured. "You do it yourself, because I have bought your works--all
your works."
He spoke as if he had purchased dunghills _en bloc_.
"We will waive that question," I said loftily. "Produce the verses."
"They--they aren't exactly verses," said the young man, plunging his
hand into his bosom.
"I beg your pardon, I meant will you be good enough to read your
five-act tragedy."
"How--how in the world did you know?" said the young man, more
impressed than ever.
He unearthed his tragedy, the title of which I have given, and began
to read. I felt as though I were walking in a dream; having been till
then ignorant of the fact that earth held young men who held five-act
tragedies in their insides. The young man gave me the whole of the
performance, from the preliminary scene, where nothing more than an
eruption of Vesuvius occurs to mar the serenity of the manager, till
the very end, where the Roman sentry of Pompeii is slowly banked up
with ashes in the presence of the audience, and dies murmuring through
his helmet-vizor: "S.P.Q.R.R.I.P.R.S.V.P.," or words to that effect.
For three hours and one-half he read to me. And then I made a mistake.
"Sir," said I, "who's your Ma and Pa?"
"I haven't got any," said he, and his lower lip quivered.
"Where do you live?" I said.
"At the back of Tarporley Mews," said he.
"How?" said I.
"On eleven shillings a week," said he.
"I was pretty well educated, and if you don't stay too long they will
let you read the books in the Holywell Street stalls."
"And you wasted your money buying my books," said I with a lump the
size of a bolster in my throat.
"I got them second-hand, four and sixpence," said he, "and some I
borrowed."
Then I collapsed. I didn't weep, but I took the tragedy and put it in
the fire, and called myself every name that I knew.
This caused the young man to sob audibly, partly from emotion and
partly from lack of food.
I took off my hat to him before I showed him out, and we went to a
restaurant and I arranged things generally on a financial basis.
Would that I could let the tale stop here. But I cannot.
Three days later a man came to see me on business, an objectionable man
of uncompromising truth. Just before he departed he said: "D' you know
anything about the struggling author of a tragedy called 'The Betrayal
of Confidences'?"
"Yes," said I. "One of the few poor souls who in the teeth of grinding
poverty keep alight."
"At the back of Tarporley Mews," said he. "On eleven shillings a week."
"On the mischief!" said I.
"He didn't happen to tell you that he considered you the finest,
subtlest, truest, and so forth of all the living so forths, did he?"
"He may have said something out of the fulness of an overladen heart.
You know how unbridled is the enthusiasm of----"
"Young gentlemen who buy your books with their last farthing. You
didn't soak it all in by any chance, give him a good meal and half a
sovereign as well, did you?"
"I own up," I said. "I did all that and more. But how do you know?"
"Because he victimised me in the same way a fortnight ago."
"Thank you for that," I said, "but I burned his disgusting manuscripts.
And he wept."
"There, unless he keeps a duplicate, you have scored one."
But considering the matter impartially, it seems to me that the game is
not more than "fifteen all" in any light.
It makes me blush to think about it.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 28: "Turnovers," No. IX.]
THE NEW DISPENSATION--I[29]
LONDON IN A FOG--NOVEMBER